Last week, I had the honor to give an Expert Lecture at King’s College London to MSc students from the Computational Finance programme. Some of the topics that we discussed during the interactive session:
- First, I shared a bit about my experience working as a Quant –7 years and counting ☺️! after graduating from a Science background and with no previous experience in Finance.
- We talked about the great number of opportunities that exist currently in the Quant world. We took a look at this image from the book “The Front Office Manual: The Definitive Guide to Trading, Structuring and Sales (Global Financial Markets) (2013)” by A. Sutherland, and J. Court
and commented on how things have changed since the book was published, so that the image should probably look more like this one ⬇️ which translates in even more opportunities for Quants!
- Then, we discussed the type of problems that Quants encounter in their jobs as well as the kind of mathematical, statistical, and programming tools that are required to solve them. In particular, we went into problems arising in the “Risk” area and also in the “Front Office” area.
- Finally, we talked a bit about the actual work process. Here, I tried to illustrate the fact that the work Quants do goes far beyond the mathematical aspect, it requires both hard and soft skills, adaptability, and collaboration.
It was a pleasure to be able to give this lecture in person this time (after delivering it online 💻 twice before) and have the chance to meet students as well as the fantastic professors who organised these events!